in the spirit of sweet confessions
understand upfront
that I’m sprinkled like salt
in mixed genre scars
I will not cover them
they are part of me

if you’re willing
to dedicate
certain afternoons
to thinking about nothing but white frosting
then this can work

I’m not opposed to communicating
via conversation hearts
hot stuff
be mine
marry me
that’ll be the quirk in us
I hope you feel the same

I believe in this next part very strongly
there is never going to never be seltzer in my apartment

have I mentioned my girl refrigerator?
we’re pretty close
she won’t come between us

just as I assume a position in my body
something always shifts me
but I think with a cake
on a cake plate
waiting the wings
ready to conquer a problem
I can finally start to balance

so if you’re ready
let’s do this
but don’t ever neglect me
and kiss these splendid goodbye

Leah Iannone is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for February 2018.

Leah Iannone received her MFA from The New School’s Creative Writing Program. She currently works as a director of academic planning. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, 12th Street, The Best American Poetry Blog, Alimentum, Redheaded Stepchild, PAX Americana, Barrow Street, Psychic Meatloaf, and The Inquisitive Eater.

But you don’t have an accent
I’m told repeatedly by urban
speech even in feeling or tone
sometimes too reflective of my
own sound that my origin simply
can’t be the south or upper
identity might question its ability
to situate itself north of my head
brimming with the congealed roux
of shame I should be showcasing
thickly from my tongue.

Do they mean how dare I shed
the dirt-laden dialect of my father
whose worn hands don’t hold
books but skin deer carcasses
hung from the swingset an acre
back from our home?

Or that it’s not enough to wear
inferiority as a cross beneath
my coat I must coat my words
with butter and bake ignorant
sentences voluminous as biscuits?

To them I sincerely apologize
with this poem in hopes it’s local-
ized enough for my speech
to be let alone but to myself
I allow the conflict of y’all
and fixing and supper to coat
my gums and bloom ulcers
within my mouth.

I take the time to swallow
my Southerness for the self
judgement of my stomach so to
you I can exude the smoothness
a digested history can belie.

Sarah Renee Beach received an MFA in Poetry from The New School where she was a reader for LIT. Follow her on twitter @sarahreneebeach.

sometimes it’s important
to say to yourself, out loud
people don’t eat their doggy bags
five minutes in the door

I have a loner’s knack
I know dinners for one
that’s the bland lesson
I’m skittish and sensitive
one day it’ll all come together
I’ll claim my flavor
teach my emotions
not to be ashamed about themselves

but then again
if I want my doggy bag in an instant
who cares
there’s macaroni in there!
sure, it’s sad
but also sweet to the point

Leah Iannone is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for February 2018.

Leah Iannone received her MFA from The New School’s Creative Writing Program. She currently works as a director of academic planning. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, 12th Street, The Best American Poetry Blog, Alimentum, Redheaded Stepchild, PAX Americana, Barrow Street, Psychic Meatloaf, and The Inquisitive Eater.

There was a time
when I ate everything
that time I h(ate)d everything
about me

I’d talk about cheese
in therapy
fill my food diaries
with lies
they were pretty
that way

I didn’t want to
work through my issues
with cheese
but at that time
there was no other way
than to map my day
around cheese

you see,
when cheese
is decidedly
the frontrunner
and coming with you
to an island
it warrants a conversation

I didn’t want
cheese
so delicious
and comforting
to be my arch enemy

in fact
I craved to
look at it lovingly
and not always think
it was trying
to take me down

Leah Iannone is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for February 2018.

Leah Iannone received her MFA from The New School’s Creative Writing Program. She currently works as a director of academic planning. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, 12th Street, The Best American Poetry Blog, Alimentum, Redheaded Stepchild, PAX Americana, Barrow Street, Psychic Meatloaf, and The Inquisitive Eater.

staying for breakfast remains
boned dance afterpartied post-whorled
way the world ends she said
i’ll bang if you’ll whimper

Daniel Horowitz is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for January 2018.

Daniel Horowitz is a farmer, teacher and writer from New York City. His heart lives in New Orleans, where the swamp of dreams speaks in the burst bubbles of an alligator’s last breath. Meanwhile, he pursues his MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and learns from children in Brooklyn Public Schools what the trees say in Prospect Park. His chapbooks, Chorus: A Poem for Voices and becuz can be found on Amazon.com (and if you ask him), learn more on his website lettersandessays.com, send cash not gifts.

Born and raised in Amityville, NY (yes, that Amityville), Shaniece Devieux has been writing poetry since her first school-supply-list-required composition notebook. She received her BA in English Arts from Hampton University and is now attending The New School for her MFA in Creative Writing. When she isn’t spending her evenings in the West Village, she works as a TA for the cutest kindergarten class in all of Long Island. She hopes to one day write a book, own a Malibu Beach house, and be featured on a Beyoncé album in no particular order.

Lover : she may say to you,
in the chill of greengrey evenings, dismal with ugly clouds,
that cups of hot water will be sufficient to pacify you.
Whisper to her, “Usually. But I am too accustomed to
keeping the company of unhappy women.”

Beards and grains of wood swirl mystically
—when hauntings appear in their chains and jewels reeking of ozone
you must sit down, eat, and discuss new ways of living without god.

It is not autumn all the time, though goodbying.
You lay your leopard carpets, leopard carpets with the faces
of dead Habsburgs in their spots. Sit. Stay a while.
Whisper, “I have been collecting iller and iller fitting pants.”

First kisses! Remember. Hormonal feints.
“Puberty : it’s a helluva drug!” Be careful.
Krazy Kat Goes A-wooing is playing on the old TV.
“Something dead,” in a midnight thought you think—
“Something dead should not be, if it must be dead,
so soon dead.” Sea salt. And lemon. And parsley.

Is this it? Your whispers—can you speak?
Whispers : “I’ve been trying to find the right diet
to make my sweat sweet-smelling.” Oysters. Though expensive.
But the garden : it is filling with babies. And. “One must
make oneself feel classy, mustn’t one?”

Oysters go with no wine at all.
Waves. Waves. Unhappy women : the aphrodisiac
is that bitterness remains edible. A whisper in return,
“Hold old are we? I’m shy about my age? Shy about the paleness
of my lips? Why can’t you be shy about… this… ritual?”

And what does our oyster say?
“Touch. I have a beard because I am wise. I have died
so others may live.” We all begin to laugh or rather to tickle.

Daniel Horowitz is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for January 2018.

Daniel Horowitz is a farmer, teacher and writer from New York City. His heart lives in New Orleans, where the swamp of dreams speaks in the burst bubbles of an alligator’s last breath. Meanwhile, he pursues his MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and learns from children in Brooklyn Public Schools what the trees say in Prospect Park. His chapbooks, Chorus: A Poem for Voices and becuz can be found on Amazon.com (and if you ask him), learn more on his website lettersandessays.com, send cash not gifts.

“BODY: If we knew how our body is made,we wouldn’t dare move.” —Flaubert

We’ll combust. Faintness creeps like a pang
an ingrown toenail—drift: my tummy… And you
standing still, staring at produce like a thigh. Grumbling,
our burn—sweating at cornucopia, hot river gods—
peanut butter’s goo and nut meat, warm:
texture of the womb—pastas well cooked
given under unwise teeth, pleasing—iced cream,
salt on pretzels, slight burn, throat’s dumbshow
its physicality—consumption, a lunged gulp.
Hunger at the hardness of a fresh pepper, red and
like you. Meat’s sponge and animal dung appeal:
also warmth, organ meat’s scented faint piss—
animals, burned to our burn: chewing and alive…

Like all gluttony it is only the indirect flare of desire
to have the world reduced to a few monumental objects:
a mountain, a bowl of beans, a truck, you my dear, and my mouth.

Daniel Horowitz is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for January 2018.

Daniel Horowitz is a farmer, teacher and writer from New York City. His heart lives in New Orleans, where the swamp of dreams speaks in the burst bubbles of an alligator’s last breath. Meanwhile, he pursues his MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and learns from children in Brooklyn Public Schools what the trees say in Prospect Park. His chapbooks, Chorus: A Poem for Voices and becuz can be found on Amazon.com (and if you ask him), learn more on his website lettersandessays.com, send cash not gifts.

The heart makes a good garnish,
red-petaled and splayed like a radish,
its blossom, proof that a knife

once sliced it. Is it reasonable
to believe we must suffer in love?
Should we expect it to hurt just a bit?

Don Hogle was the winner of the 2016 Hayden’s Ferry Review poetry contest as selected by Alberto Rios and a finalist in the 2015 Northern Colorado Writers and Aesthetica Creative Writing contests. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chautauqua, Mud Season Review, Minetta Review, Blast Furnace, New Verse News and Shooter and A3 Review in the U.K. among others. He lives in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com

Where was Bernard? She wiped spilled sugar
from the gold-flecked Formica table and began
preparing deviled eggs. Henrietta thought about the day
she’d told him the good news, right after the Herring Festival.
She ate a candied apple at the bar and he’d shouted,
“Sambuca for everyone!” And how months later she’d sat
at this very table, timing her contractions while anthrax
updates aired on CNN. He was getting his beard trimmed
at the barbershop when she called to say, “It’s time!”
In the elevator at Mt. Sinai she knew not even morphine
could save her now. Bernard bought a bag of salted Fiji
almonds in the gift shop, and the male nurse warned him,
“None for Henrietta, only ice chips!” She hated the nurse
and the COURTESY COUNTS button pinned to his scrubs.
She hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, and what she wanted
even more than Demerol were oysters. A dozen slippery
oysters nestled in those ice chips. The way she’d had them
at the café on Rivington Street the night she knew
she was pregnant. Henrietta put the plate of deviled eggs
on the table. She’d dyed the whites pink, and stuck sprigs
of something fragrant and green in the creamy centers.
Bernard phoned, he was running late as usual, “Don’t start
without me.” He said he was hungry for something
cooked with love.

Liora Mondlak is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for December 2017.

Liora Mondlak remembers accompanying her mother to the market in Mexico City, where she grew up. She remembers the chickens hanging by their feet, and the sawdust around her saddle shoes. Years later, she would return to the market to buy ground chameleon, a well-known love potion, which she uses sparingly.

She lives in New York with her teenage daughter, where she teaches art and poetry. Lioramondlak.com